An Iron Hand Upon the People: The Law Against the Potlatch on the Northwest Coast

Douglas Cole and Ira Chaikin's An Iron Hand Upon the People, The Law Against the Potlatch on the Northwest Coast, published by Douglas and McIntyre in Vancouver in 1990, is the standard academic history of the Canadian federal ban on the potlatch ceremony among Northwest Coast Indigenous peoples, drawing on court records, missionary correspondence and government files across the sixty six years the law remained in force, from 1885 to 1951. Its authority rests on that sustained archival documentary base and the book's standing as the reference historians of the potlatch ban regularly cite. Its strength is precisely that documentary range, letting the book trace both the law's enforcement and Indigenous resistance to it across six and a half decades. Its limit is that it is a legal and administrative history built from colonial era government and missionary records, so the potlatch's own religious and social meaning to the communities that practiced it is better drawn from Indigenous accounts and ethnography specifically focused on that meaning, which this atlas cites separately.